Titanic's 'Unknown Child' Identified

One of the Titanic's most famous passengers, a little boy known as the “unknown child,” has finally been identified, according to a team of American and Canadian researchers.

The remains of the young boy are “most likely those of an English child, Sidney Leslie Goodwin,” Ryan Parr, vice president of research and development for Genesis Genomics Inc. in Ontario, and colleagues write in the June issue of the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics.

Recovered from the Atlantic's icy waters five days after the luxury liner sank, the body of the small child was buried with some 150 other Titanic victims in a cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

An inscription on his granite gravestone reads "Erected to the memory of an unknown child whose remains were recovered after the Titanic disaster."

A touching symbol of all the children who died following the disaster in 1912, the "unknown child" also represents a compelling case of DNA error.

Following exhumation of the grave in 2001, which produced in a 2.4-inch-long fragment of an arm bone and three teeth, Parr and colleagues concluded that the child was Eino Viljami Panula, a 13-month-old Finnish infant who drowned with his parents in the disaster.

Examination of the tiny teeth and DNA sequencing resulted in the incorrect identification, write the researchers.

The genetic analysis involved mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) typing, a method used by forensics scientists. The procedure often uses two regions of mtDNA, which have very high rates of mutation and are therefore optimal for studying differences among people.

The two regions are called HV1 and HV2 (hypervariable region 1 and hypervariable region 2).

Since mitochondrial DNA is passed from a mother to her children, the researchers compared the unknown child's DNA HV1 sequence with samples from maternal relatives of all six boys under age 3 who had died in the shipwreck.

However, a pair of leather shoes recovered from the unknown child and held in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax led the researchers to reconsider. The shoes were too large for a 13-month-old like the Finnish boy.

The researchers carried out more extensive mtDNA analysis, and this time also sequenced the HVS2 region, which positively confirmed that the unknown remains are Goodwin's.

According to Parr, the test gave "98 percent certainty the identification is correct," Live Science reports.